You finally have an approval on that print project you’ve been working on for the last few months. All that’s left to do is make a PDF for the printer and be done with it, right?

Nope. It’s time to do some housekeeping on the file. Let me use this metaphor, once you’ve made dinner, you don’t leave your dirty pots and pans in the sink, do you?

It’s time to do some housekeeping, and in this episode of “must haves” on the Colecandoo Youtube channel, we’ll look at several scripts to keep your files nice and tidy.

Disclaimer

One word of caution with any of the scripts shown in the video. They are all destructive in nature. That is, they intentionally remove items from a document. Make sure you save your work prior to running these scripts, just in case they have a catastrophic impact on your artwork. I’m showing these scripts for educational purposes only, this is not a tutorial on how to use these scripts.

Images and Frames

The first script removes items from the pasteboard. Run the script and select the distance from the trim edge and importantly whether threaded text on the pasteboard should be removed.

I can hear some of you now saying “but what if I’ve left important notes on the pasteboard for the next person who works on the artwork”? Well, either don’t use this script, or put your notes on after you’ve run this script.

This script removes any purely empty frames, that is no fill or stroke that have no special settings applied such as text wrap or text on a path. Once run, it scans the document and removes all of these empty frames.

The next script resamples all images over a given resolution to a more appropriate resolution. It’s great for projects such as yearbooks where the resolution of images is often far greater than it needs to be.

Now, I was in two minds to whether I show this script or not. Out of the scripts being shown in this video, this is both the most powerful and potentially most destructive of them. Ultimately, read the instructions before using this script, and make sure you have access to backups in case things go wrong.

Colour

Next, let’s address some colour issues that may have come about from selecting registration by mistake, or left-over swatches from a Microsoft Word import.

Unlike many scripts I’ve shown previously, most of these scripts are buried in forum posts, so it’s a matter of reading the post, finding the script, copying and pasting into a text editor and saving as a .jsx file.

It’s worth noting that all of these scripts only affect colours generated within InDesign, so won’t fix colour issues in links such as PDFs or photoshop files.

Add unnamed colours

Let’s start off with this easy one-line script that adds all unnamed colours to the swatches palette. True, it’s just as easy to select this from the swatches menu. Regardless how it’s run, this should be the first step to cleaning up the swatches. You can cut and paste it from below:

There are two scripts that can take faux black values and convert them either to 100% black or rich black. The faux black is determined by CMYK values beyond certain percentages. In this case, any swatch that is over 70 Cyan, 60 Magenta, 60 Yellow and 90 Black will be converted to either 100% black or rich black. You can dig into the script if you like, and redefine what constitutes a rich black or faux black.

This is a series of scripts that removes any styles not used in the artwork, as well as unnecessary style groups that may have been left, whether deep in folders or not. In the video it is combined into one “catch-all” script for convenience, but it is the work of many authors, so it’s not right for me to host it. Links to the originals can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Lastly, this script removes all guidelines in a document. I can see that there would be some use for guidelines to remain in a document, but felt it was worth demonstrating.

Preflight

To be sure that the artwork is completely free of issues, we want to make sure that there are no prepress issues. To make sure that the artist complied with the preflight that was associated with the document, there’s the preflight enforcer.

As shown on the Colecandoo Youtube channel before, I’ve prepared two scripts that will either warn or prevent a user from printing or exporting to PDF until all preflight issues are resolved.

So there you have it, over ten scripts that will help make housekeeping of InDesign files a lot easier. If there’s any that I’ve missed or you feel would be worthy of a future video, let me know via my contact page.

Adobe InDesign has a magnificient feature that displays a list of prepress issues that may be present in artwork, and updates this in real-time. It is the live preflight feature, and it’s certainly not a new feature in Adobe InDesign. That said, considering some of the files that I receive that are considered to be “finished art”, I wonder how many people know that this feature exists; or uses the feature before handing off their finished artwork to their printer or supplier.

To be fair, the live preflight feature is rather passive in Adobe InDesign. If the preflight panel isn’t loaded into your set of panels in your workspace, it is only visible at the bottom of the screen, and is less than 50 pixels in height. The default preflight that is performed on artwork only alerts on a handful of items, some of which have dedicated alerts to their absence anyway (such as overset text, missing fonts and missing links).

In this Colecandoo video, I demonstrate that the preflights can be much more powerful, the basic preflight can be replaced with far more powerful preflights, and I demonstrate some traps to look out for that are not detected with any preflight. The video also demonstrates two scripts that are designed to prevent users from printing or exporting their artwork until it passes the live preflight check. If you’re interested in obtaining a copy of this on-request script, head to the contact page and ask for the “preflight enforcer scripts”.

In a future video, I’ll elaborate on the demonstration file used in the video, as it contains dozens of prepress errors.

Anyone who has placed a logo that had a strict set of rules in the stylesheet knows how confusing it can be to determine the clear-space around a logo. Often, stylesheets present a clear-space around a logo in the following manner:

In this instance, the value of X is half the width of the rolled-up poster in the graphic. That’s fine when used at scale, but when placing the logo, there is nothing to indicate the clearspace.

This is further complicated if the logo has to be scaled upwards or downwards, as the clear-space too has to be scaled. It can involve formulas to work out the amount of clear-space, or doing what most of us are probably doing but not admitting and ignoring the rules completely, placing the graphics by eye instead.

Another issue is that of logos being scaled beyond their minimum size. I find that this is normally because while the style-sheet dictates the minimum size, the logo supplied is at another size – not the minimum size that the logo should be.

The solution: Include the clear-space areas as part of the graphic

This can be accomplished by making a box that has a white fill with no stroke to represent the area that is to be the clear space around the logo, and send it to the back of the logo. While the box is selected, go to the transparency palette and set the transparency to multiply with an opacity of 100%. Lastly, with the transparent white box still selected, go to the Object menu, Artboards, Fit to selected art. Save the file as either an illustrator file or PDF.

Now whenever this graphic is placed into InDesign, no matter what box size is used to import the image, the logo will always maintain its clear space as part of the logo.

Create the logo as the minimum size

Many style-sheets dictate the smallest size a logo should to be in height and width. By creating the logo at the smallest size that the style-sheet allows, the logo will be placed in InDesign at its minimum size and can only be scaled above 100%. Sure, it doesn’t prevent users scaling the logo beyond the smallest size, but if users are unsure what the smallest size is, the style sheet can tell clients to place the given logo at 100% scale into InDesign.

Now before you start heading for the comments box below to say that this only works if the logo is being placed onto a white background, that is incorrect as the following screenshot out of InDesign shows:

That screenshot was taken while using the overprint preview in InDesign. If using the regular preview, the layout will look something like this:

But it will still output to PDF and print as it did in the overprint preview picture.

Like this:

Adobe InDesign ships with a limited set of scripts within the scripts panel. While these scripts are appropriately named, they do not contain tooltips that elaborate on how the script works or what each script does.

For users of InDesign who rarely – if ever – open the scripts panel, this is not really an issue. But for users who have embraced the power of scripting within InDesign and have acquired or created scripts, the scripts palette can become quite unwieldy. Left unchecked, the scripts panel can get to the point where it is unknown what many scripts do, how they work (i.e. if they had a user interface or were designed to be implemented in specific workflows) or if they still work since they were added to the scripts folder.

It is possible to organise the scripts folder into categories using Windows Explorer or Mac Finder. Even so, there are still hundreds of scripts, and the file naming of the scripts often leaves very little to the imagination.

Scripts can have tooltips

Seasoned scripters will be aware of this, but for InDesign users who have used scripts but cannot write them, this practical tip may be of some use.

It is possible to have better descriptions in the form of tooltips – some script authors have the foresight to add such a tooltip to a script so that when one hovers over the script name in the scripts palette, a good description of the script was given instead of relying on the filename. Such an example is IDentify, from InDesign javascript expert, Jongware.

Luckily, it is possible to add tooltips to scripts that do not have them. To demonstrate, a description will be added to the empty text frame script. To do this, Right click (or control click) on the script while in the scripts panel of InDesign and choose “Reveal in Finder” (or Explorer on Windows). Once the folder window is presented, open the text editor (NOT a word processor but a plain text editor) of choice.

The following script needs a description added to it. To do this, add a line at the start of the script that looks like this:

//DESCRIPTION:type the description of what the script does here

(since it is known what the script does, a better description will be written)

Save the file and return to InDesign. Return to the script panel and hover the cursor over the script that was just edited.

And there it is – a better description for the script, in case the script isn’t used for a while and its purpose becomes forgotten.